Ryan North on Unleashing His New, Improved, Record-Breaking Hamlet Tale

Photo: Randall North

Ryan North has a knack for attracting an audience to his ideas. His long-running Dinosaur Comics has roughly 70,000 readers, despite the fact that every issue features the exact same panel layout and crude dinosaur clip art. One of the most popular installments introduced the idea of a “machine of death,” a device that can accurately predict the manner of your demise. But when North and friends tried to interest publishers in a machine of death book, they were told it would never sell. Yet the volume, which they published themselves, hit No. 1 on Amazon.com the day of its release.

“You can have an idea that everyone else thinks is dumb, and it’s still a good idea,” says Ryan North in Episode 93 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

His latest idea is To Be or Not to Be, a new version of Hamlet modeled after the popular Choose Your Own Adventure series. The story includes such innovations as a kick-ass Ophelia, a choose-your-own-adventure-style book within the book, and a massive pirate battle. (The original story alludes to Hamlet’s encounter with pirates, though they never appear on stage.) A Kickstarter to print the book raised over half a million dollars late last year, at the time making it the most successful publishing-related Kickstarter ever (it has since been surpassed by a Planet Money campaign).

“It helped that I have ten years of producing work behind me,” says North, whose Kickstarter backers have been receiving their To Be or Not to Be goodies over the last few weeks (it hits stores on Tuesday). “So I can say, ‘Hey, we’ve had this relationship for years. Here’s a new thing I’m doing. Maybe you want to check it out.'”

Listen to our complete interview with Ryan North in Episode 93 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). Then stick around after the interview as Kat Howard, Grady Hendrix, and Matt London join us to discuss Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Ryan North on writing nonlinear narratives:

“I’ve never written a novel before, and part of the reason I haven’t is I was worried about getting 50,000 words into a book and realizing I’d made a mistake on word three that would mean throwing everything out. But in a nonlinear narrative you can explore different options, and as they pan out or fail to pan out you can extend or shorten them, and if you have a path that goes five or six choices and then you feel like it’s done, that’s not a problem. You have a nice little mini-adventure there and you can move on to something else. It was also really nice that I could work on Ophelia’s story and if I was getting stuck with that I could switch to whatever Hamlet was up to. So it was very empowering — ironically — for a guy who doesn’t like to make choices.”

Ryan North on Choose Your Own Adventure books:

“I read them as a kid and I loved them … It’s that sense of fun and possibility that I wanted to capture. And there are things I wanted to do differently. You realize when you’re writing a book like this that every choice you make has this combinatorial explosion to more choices, and so you need to trim that tree, otherwise you’ll never get anywhere with the story. And in the books I read as a child that tree would get trimmed by saying, ‘Go left or go right. If you go left, the earth explodes. If you go right, Mars attacks and aliens invade.’ And the effects of my choices were so far beyond what the actual choices were that it felt like the choices were kind of meaningless. When you’re living in such a capricious universe, why make any choices at all, when you can’t predict their outcomes?”

Grady Hendrix on the origins of Choose Your Own Adventure:

“Packard was a lawyer, and he was making up bedtime stories for his daughters, and they wanted different things [to happen], and so he’s like, ‘Oh, I could do a book like this.’ … And then he saw an ad for a small children’s press that R.A. Montgomery had started, and he sent them this idea … Montgomery’s story is way more fascinating … He was working for a company that did government contracts to come up with role-playing games and social psychology tools to use in American diplomacy and defense applications. And so he was coming up with these games that Peace Corps volunteers were using to deal with Vietnam War protests when they were stationed in Southeast Asia … And [the company] actually, from what I can tell, was either in the same building or near the same building as Infocom, who made the first text-based computer adventure games. And so Montgomery, when he heard this idea from Packard, was like, ‘Oh wow, that’s amazing,’ and then he got all into it. But I just find it amazing that all this proto-interactivity stuff was coming out of basically a half-mile square area in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the same time.”

Grady Hendrix on the endings of Choose Your Own Adventure books:

“One of the things I thought was interesting about the Choose Your Own Adventure books, and I think the thing I liked about them so much, is that the endings weren’t moral. In a lot of YA books at the time — and I think even now — endings are very moral. Good people come to mostly good endings and bad people come to bad endings and characters who do a lot of heroin and random thrill killing usually come to a sticky end where they realize the errors of their ways. And characters who help people and believe in themselves come to good endings. And the thing that was so great about the Choose Your Own Adventure books is that the endings were so amoral. Like Mystery of Chimney Rock. Some of the endings you’re eaten by a cat, in others you shrink for no reason, in some you die of pneumonia, in some you suffocate, I think in one you end up in Hell. There was such a variety of things that could happen to you and it had nothing to do with whether you were making ‘good’ choices or ‘bad’ choices.”